The nun turned before Anka could see her tears, and then she pulled Yona into a brief, tight hug. “God be with you, child,” she whispered in Yona’s ear, and then she turned and hurried out of the church basement without looking back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Anka was light as a bird in Yona’s arms—too light. Holding her precious cargo, she hurried past a cluster of German soldiers who paid her no mind, past a queue of empty-eyed townspeople outside a butcher shop with cobwebs on the windows, past a deserted school. Across the town, curtains were drawn tight, most shop fronts were closed, and the few people who walked around did so with eyes downcast, their clothing as gray as the buildings surrounding them, as if they were trying to disappear.
By some miracle, she and Anka reached the edge of town without anyone stopping them. Then again, the town was quiet, waiting. Heart pounding and arms aching with the weight of the child, Yona quickened her pace and headed east on a dirt road toward the safety of the forest until she spotted the farmhouse Sister Maria Andrzeja had described, the white one with red window frames and a broken eagle’s wing on the weather vane.
“Is this it?” Anka asked weakly. She had been drifting in and out of sleep, and now she opened her eyes and peered around as Yona walked up the dirt drive to the farmhouse. Out back, a weathered gray barn stood stubborn against the bleak morning sky, its back to the trees beyond. Looking past it, to the edge of the forest, made Yona’s heart lurch unexpectedly. She belonged out there, in the wood, not here in this village. But Jerusza had always told her never to question God’s plan, that even when things felt like they were falling apart, there was always a reason, always a purpose.
The door to the farmhouse opened, and a tall, slender woman in her fifties stood there staring for only a second or two before rushing toward them. She looked once into Yona’s eyes, nodded, and put a hand on Anka’s forehead. She pulled quickly away as if she’d been burned. “Who sent you?”
“Er… the Siberian iris. You are Maja?”
The woman pursed her lips and nodded. “Into the house, before anyone sees you,” she said, and though there didn’t appear to be another soul around, Yona followed, realizing that in this world, as in hers, invisible eyes could watch from the darkness.
Inside, the farmhouse was dimly lit and smelled of yeast and straw. Dust coated the chairs and table. Without a word, the woman led Yona, still carrying Anka, into a room in the back and closed the door. “There is a trapdoor in the floor, beneath the rug,” she said, finally turning to them. Her words were clipped, tense. “Not a good solution for the long term, but good for you to know if you were followed today.”
“We were not.”
The woman’s eyes flicked to Anka and back. “You should put the child down,” she said without waiting for an answer. She gestured to the small, threadbare sofa to the side of the room, and Yona gently lowered the girl, who groaned softly. “She is wounded, I see.” Maja’s forehead creased in concern. “Badly.”
“Yes. She was shot. We have cleaned the wound, and the bullet is gone, but she needs to heal.”
The woman muttered something under her breath, an indiscernible expletive, and then she studied the girl for a long, silent moment before turning back to Yona. “I will help. I give you my word. But who are you? How have you come to bring her to me? You are not her mother.”
Yona wondered how Maja could see that so clearly. “I—” She began to speak, but then she stopped. How could she explain who she was, what she was doing here? She could hardly understand it herself. “Her parents are dead,” she said at last.
Something shifted and then softened in Maja’s expression. “They all are these days. So many children without parents.” She shook her head. “What is her name, then?”
“Anka. She will live if you keep the wound clean and her fever down. I have brought you some yarrow, which—”
“I know,” Maja interrupted. She smiled slightly. “I know the forest’s secrets, too. Before I married my husband, before I came here to live, I was a nurse. It is why the sisters send people to me from time to time, people who need healing.” She bent beside Anka, who was watching them with wide, confused eyes, and said slowly, “Hello, Anka. I am Maja Yarashuk. I will keep you safe.”
Anka blinked at her but didn’t say a word.
“What will you do with her?” Yona asked.
“I have friends. They help people disappear. But I will wait until she is stable and well.” She stood abruptly.
“Here in this house?” Yona looked uncertainly toward the front windows. If anyone had an inkling that there was something suspicious going on here, there would be nowhere to hide.
Maja stared at her for a long time, evaluating her. “There is another trapdoor in one of the stalls in the barn. That is all you need to know. Now go. The sooner you are gone, the safer she will be.”
Yona knew the words weren’t intended to wound her, but they did. Was she only meant to preserve life for a moment before being driven away? It was a strange role to play, and it stirred in her a great feeling of loneliness, a sense of belonging nowhere. But Maja was right: better for the girl to be absorbed into this house, hidden and healed, and then sent on to start a new life somewhere else, God willing.
Yona knelt beside Anka and placed a hand on the little girl’s forehead. It was still cool, a good sign. “You will be safe here,” she murmured, touching the girl’s hollow cheek.
“How do you know?” Anka asked in a whisper.
Yona looked up at Maja, who was watching them. “I know,” she said, looking back at Anka. “We must trust Sister Maria Andrzeja. She risked her life to save you, and she trusts Maja. We must believe in her, too.”
Anka searched Yona’s eyes, and then she nodded. “All right.” She glanced up at Maja and then back at Yona. “All right.”
Yona stood and nodded at Maja. “Shall I bring you some more herbs? Some food?”
Maja glanced at Anka and then led Yona out of the room. Over her shoulder, as she went, Yona raised her hand, a silent goodbye to Anka. The little girl raised hers in return, touching the air where Yona had just been.
“I’ll say it again: you must not return,” Maja said firmly once they were out of the girl’s earshot. “It is for the girl’s own good. And for yours.”
“But I—”
“Thank you for bringing her here. But you cannot save everyone all by yourself. Trust me to do my part.” Maja’s voice was firm, and had there not been kindness in her eyes, Yona might have gone back for the girl immediately, taken her with her. But she could read the honesty in Maja’s face, the grit, the weariness, and she knew Anka would be as safe here as anyone could be in the midst of a war. “Now, go.”
Yona drew a deep breath and then, without allowing herself to look back, she slipped out the front door and scanned the quiet morning. She would need to cross through the heart of the village to make it to the woods on the other side. Anka would be safe. Maja was right: she couldn’t save everyone all by herself. And now, as the nun had said, it was time for her to go.
Yona had been gone for only an hour and a half when she reentered from the dirt road leading into town. A young German soldier, who hadn’t been there before, was blocking the road as she approached.
“Halt,” he said in Belorussian. “Who are you and where are you coming from?”
For an instant, instead of fear, Yona felt instead a great sweep of sadness. The man’s accent was foreign, but his words were perfect; unlike the officer she had met earlier, he was obviously bright. But instead of spreading his wings in a university somewhere, using his intelligence to make the world a better place, he was here, an anonymous soldier on a dirt road to nowhere, doing the devil’s work in a foreign land.
“Do you not speak Belorussian?” he asked after Yona’s silence had gone on too long, and now she felt less pity for him, because there was a curtness to his tone. “Damn it, I can’t make heads or tails out of these towns. Are you Polish? Do any
of you peasants even know what you are? No matter, soon you’ll all be speaking German.”
She looked up and met his gaze. His eyes were icy blue, his narrow nose sharp as a bird’s beak. “I am on the way to pray in the church,” she replied in perfect Belorussian.
He arched an eyebrow. “And you are coming from where?”
“Milk. I went to see if any of the farmers on the edge of town had milk they could spare.” It was the first thing she could think of.
“Milk? For whom?”
She thought instantly of Anka. “My daughter.”
His eyes moved to her belly, flat as a board, and then back to her face. “Your daughter?”
She refused to look away. “She is four years old and starving.”
The soldier continued to study her. “But you have no milk.”
“None of the farmers had any to give. I—I could not pay.”
The soldier snorted. “And you hoped that someone would give you some out of goodness? Madam, there is no goodness left here. Don’t you know?”
“That is why I am going to church. I will ask God to help provide.”
He shook his head, his gaze sliding away. “God is not there this morning, madam, I assure you. Go home if you know what’s good for you.”
Her heart skipped in her chest. “Has something happened?” She thought of the nuns’ conversation the night before, the hundred innocent townspeople, Mother Bernardyna’s intention to argue their case with the Germans.
Anguish flashed across his face, replaced quickly by anger. “Please, just take my advice and go home to your child, all right?”
She forced herself to relax. “Yes, sir,” she said, and he nodded, apparently satisfied that he had properly put her in her place. “Thank you.” She hurried past him, relieved that he’d let her go without asking for her papers. She had the ones Sister Maria Andrzeja had hastily insisted she take, but she suspected they would fool only someone less intelligent.
“Wait!” he bellowed behind her, and she froze. Had he realized, after all, that she’d been lying?
She turned slowly, forcing innocence across her face.
He strode toward her, and she stood stock-still, holding her breath. He studied her face once more, as if trying to decide something. Then, hastily, he withdrew a small object from his pocket and handed it to her. “Here. For your daughter.”
She took it, and he was already walking away, back to his post, before she realized what it was. It was a small bar of chocolate, German lettering on the wrapper. For him, it must have been a piece of home, and yet he’d given it to her, concerned for a starving four-year-old. Her heart squeezed. It was a shred of decency in a world gone mad. “Thank you!” she called out, but he didn’t turn. He merely raised his right hand in acknowledgment, and after a second’s pause, she, too, went on her way.
The road to the church was silent, unnaturally so. This time of morning, people should have been bustling about. As she drew closer, she could hear raised voices and the murmurs of a crowd, could feel a ripple of terror in the air the way one might feel a coming storm. She wanted to break into a run, but it would look suspicious, and so instead she walked as quickly as her legs would take her until she rounded the corner, bringing the square in front of the church into view. Immediately, she had to clap her hand over her mouth to stop from screaming.
The square teemed with townspeople, at least two hundred of them, jammed elbow to elbow, some of them whispering, some crying. On either side of the crowd, Germans with rifles kept watch. Ahead of them, on the steps of the church, stood the nuns, all eight of them, with Sister Maria Andrzeja on one end and Mother Bernardyna on the other. They were standing in a row, all of them watching in silence as the body of a young priest swung lifeless from a lopsided, rudimentary gallows that had evidently been constructed from several broken church pews. Yona felt her stomach lurch, tasted bile in her throat. What had happened in the short time she’d been gone?
“This,” a stout German officer was bellowing to the crowd in heavily accented Belorussian, “is what happens when you choose to fight us! You brought this on yourselves! Do you understand? The blood of this priest is on your hands!”
Yona stood frozen, staring at Sister Maria Andrzeja’s face. The nun’s eyes looked straight ahead, and her jaw was set, her chin thrust upward, defiant, angry. How had the sisters wound up in this position? Yona had to do something, but what?
She took a steadying breath and began to move quietly forward through the throng, which parted easily, for no one wanted to be visible today; they were all jostling to hide behind one another. In a minute, she found herself at the front of the crowd, which was filled almost entirely with young women, small children hidden behind them. Their courage made Yona draw a deep breath; they had all placed their bodies here deliberately to protect the youngsters behind them. They didn’t understand that their flesh and bones would offer no shield against a volley of bullets.
“This priest!” the German officer was saying as he paced, his face flushed with anger. “He is dead because of all of you. A week ago, there was an attack on a German soldier, and the assailant got away. Yesterday, we arrested a hundred citizens of this village, with the intention of making them pay for the crime, as an example to all of you. But this priest stepped forward this morning and offered his life for theirs. So, too, did these eight nuns.”
Yona gasped aloud, the sound absorbed by the anguished murmur of the crowd. Suddenly, she understood. The nuns had been planning this all along; when Mother Bernardyna had mentioned last night the bargain she’d hoped to strike, this had been it. This morning, Sister Maria Andrzeja had given Yona her papers because she knew she wouldn’t need them any longer. “No,” she murmured.
“We accepted their bargain,” the German continued, shouting at the crowd. “All of you must be punished today, so that the lesson sticks, which is why you’re gathered here to watch. You’re like children, all of you, and this is the only way children can learn. Maybe today, you will understand.”
Yona tried to catch Sister Maria Andrzeja’s eye, but the nun continued to stare resolutely ahead. Yona was so focused on staring at the nun that it took her a few seconds to realize that there were eyes on her, too. She turned to see the German officer she’d encountered yesterday, the one who had seemed so perplexed by her eyes, standing off to the side in a cluster of other officers. He was watching her, a strange look on his face, and as their gazes locked, he murmured something to the officer next to him, a tall man with graying dark hair, whose back was turned to the crowd.
The taller officer turned slowly, and as he did, time seemed to stop for Yona. In the background, she could still hear the German on the steps, and the rumble of the frightened crowd, but it was as if her field of vision had suddenly narrowed as the man’s face came into view and his eyes met hers.
His face was creased like worn fabric, and though his mouth pulled down at the corners, though his eyes had sunken farther into his face with age, she recognized him in an instant, the sight of him triggering long-latent, milk-scented fragments of memory. A face above her long-ago infant bed. A smile at her first step. A hand slipping into hers, huge and warm, to steady her.
And here he was, impossibly, more than two decades later, more than nine hundred kilometers from the apartment on Behaimstrasse in Berlin where she’d seen him last.
It was Siegfried Jüttner, the man who’d once been her father.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
His eyes never leaving hers, Jüttner started down the steps toward her, trailed by the officer who’d spoken with her yesterday, and as she stood there, paralyzed, she registered dully that he was a high-ranking officer, his uniform decorated with elaborate, silver-braided shoulder straps and collar patches. He had almost reached her before she snapped out of her shock and began sliding backward away from him, away from this man whose blood she shared. Her whole body was shaking, and her legs trembled as she melted into the crowd, never taking her eyes off hi
m.
Lives are circles spinning across the world, and when they’re meant to intersect again, they do, Jerusza had said on her deathbed. Now, suddenly, Yona understood. The old woman had foreseen a moment like this, a terrible reunion. Perhaps the current had been pulling Yona west after all, to this. But why? We believe in God’s plan, Sister Maria Andrzeja had said just that morning, but how could any of this be it?
Up on the church steps, the angry officer was still bellowing. “So you see? Now you will witness the deaths of these eight nuns!” he barked, and the ensuing panic of the crowd was enough to let Yona slip deeper into the mass of people, hidden from her father, who was now scanning faces wildly as he moved closer. Heart thudding, tears prickling her eyes, Yona made herself smaller and smaller, letting the frantic crowd swallow her. “And maybe you will remember this the next time you consider crossing us!”
The crowd stirred, mothers bending to their young children, old men falling to their knees to pray, teenagers mumbling about rebellion and powerlessness. On the church steps, the officer was beckoning to eight soldiers, one for each of the nuns, to step forward with handguns. Suddenly, Yona stopped in her tracks. She could still see her father, but he couldn’t see her, though he was scanning the crowd desperately. She felt suddenly ill, and though she didn’t have the right vantage point to see the nuns anymore, she could feel their pain radiating out over the assembled group.
And at that instant, before the German soldiers raised their guns, before the order was given, Yona knew that everything in her life up to this moment had been designed to lead her here, to this place, where she might be the one person with the power to halt what was about to happen. She didn’t know why, but she knew what she had to do. As others crossed themselves and cowered, as the nuns raised their eyes to God, she took a deep breath, stood, and turned in the direction of the man who’d given her life. “Stop!” she cried in German. “Siegfried Jüttner! Please, stop this!”
The Forest of Vanishing Stars Page 19